Parents: Are You Emotionally Disconnected from Your Children? (Part 2)

In the first section of this topic we discussed some basic information about how emotional disconnection might affect the individuals’ emotional wellbeing. In this second section I would like to share with you some of the most common indicators of a serious problem with emotionally absent parents:

1. Insensitivity to the emotional experiences of their children (feel like parents were not interested or had no clue of what was going on inside their children), but highly involved and invested in providing financial resources, education, and other material things.
2. Their children do not feel genuinely loved or even known as a real person. Sadly, when the children are distressed and asking for help, parents generally come up unsuccessful.
3. Absent parents generally are stretched too thin and feel like they do not have to do more than the bare minimum for their families.
4. Often, they are emotionally numb, and preoccupied with other concerns.
5. They are not attuned to their own inner world and that limit their ability to be attuned to their children.
6. A huge amount of emotionally absent parents are unaware of how they have been perceived by their children. More often, they are just repeating the detached relationship they had with their own parents. Some maybe lost their parents young and had little or no modeling of a parent at all.
7. Usually, they are trapped in their own dramas, possibly in an abusive partnership, or experiencing something like mental illness.
8. They may be so captivated in their own trauma, addiction, depression, or other mental health circumstances that they are emotionally unavailable for that reason.

In a third section we will review how children might be experiencing and reacting to emotional absent parents, and ways to heal this issue. Stay tuned!